Mapping of OECD-MDS (culture collections standard) to ABCD
Mergen, P., Guissart, F., Swings, J., Berendsohn, W., Hobern, D., Dawyndt, P., Wautelet, F.On 27-28 October 2003 an expert workshop “Towards a global infrastructure for microbial information” took place in Brussels. It was co-organised and co-funded by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC) and Belgium (the Belgian Coordinated Collections of Microorganisms (BCCM), the Belgian Biodiversity Information Facility (BeBIF) and the Belgian Biodiversity Platform (BBPF). It gathered 58 experts in biodiversity and microbial information from 13 countries.
In this international context the main objectives of this workshop were to define standards and protocols for sharing microbial information i.e. to determine: which microbial data Microbial Resources Centres (MRCs) want to share with GBIF and within the future Global Biological Resource Centres Network (GBRCN), how to share it, and which data MRCs want to access from GBIF Microbial Resources Centres.
The participants agreed to test the use of GBIF network and data exchange standards to make an index of MRCs core data available for searching.. The Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD, http://www.bgbm.org/tdwg/CODATA/Schema/default.htm) XML schema, that offers many possibilities and concepts, has been reviewed by experts in microbial data in order to make it match to the requirements of MRCs. This recommendations have been transmitted to the ABCD Task group to be implemented to the ABCD version 2 developments. Trials of mapping the microbial data, including additional information on sequences and literature against the DarwinCore and ABCD schemas have been performed. BeBIF initiated a testing phase that is open to any culture collection worldwide. DarwinCore tests can be followed at http://digir.bebif.be , ABCD tests at http://biocase.bebif.be/querytool and both are available at http://www.gbif.net
The recommended standard mapping for microbial information against ABCD will be presented to a wide range of microbial experts at the 10 th International Congress for Culture Collections (ICCC-10, 10-15 October 2004, Tsukuba , Japan ).